One of those errands was to get an extra Gerton desk leg from IKEA. I got a desk from IKEA before we moved. A cheap one, where you get legs and a surface separately and just assemble them. Mostly this desk has worked fine, except for one thing:
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Banana desk. |
Yes, the surface is bending, and bending quite a lot. It's in no danger of breaking or anything, but it's a bit annoying. The real solution would have been to get a solid wood surface from somewhere, but that's expensive and heavy. Instead, I opted to add a fifth leg to the desk.
It would have been easy, but IKEA is a very clever company and knows how to make things cheaper more than anybody. These desks aren't solid at all. It's a wooden frame with leg supports in the corners, then rigid sheets of laminate on the top and bottom. The box construction should make the desk fairly strong, but it means the interior is mostly filled with nothing as far as I can tell. And "nothing" is not a great material for wood screws to get a grip in.
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I glued a piece of plywood to the underside of the desk, then screwed the screws through the plywood and into the desk.
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The solution is to glue a wooden support piece to the bottom, then fix the leg onto that instead. I got a scrap piece of 15mm plywood at the Makeman shop in Urasoe, and cut off a 17×17cm square. Wood glue is very strong and the force from the leg is almost all directed inwards, but I figured that if the screws went in through the desk bottom it would help keep the piece steady until the glue set. With a 15mm thick board the screws stick out almost another centimeter, giving me a solid joint.
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The desk with its extra leg. It still needs to bend back just a little more, but that will take some time.
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It will take a few weeks for the surface to bend back fully; I've adjusted the length of the middle leg twice already and I'll probably adjust it once or twice more before it's completely level. Once it is level, though, it should be completely stable. A fun little post-holiday project.
Did you look at the product specs to see what the maximum load weight was listed as?
ReplyDeleteI did - both legs and surface have a 50kg limit. That's well above what they get here. The bending didn't get any worse, and I was never worried that it would break.
ReplyDeleteOne thing did strike me just now though: Naha is very humid - with the box construction, and different materials on top and botom, it is possible that the humidity could cause it to warp, and contribute to the bend.